event mechanics

Understanding Media
Draft unit outline

This is a work in progress for an introductory first year undergraduate unit.

Set text: A Dictionary of Media and Communication. Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday 2011 OUP

Week 1
Lecture: Media Literacies in the Age of Permanent Beta
Understanding media, on being media literate. Media Studies 1.0 and Media Studies 2.0, what does it mean? You are already media literate. “Digital natives.” What this course will do. Media Literacy. Course introduction.
Tutorial: [no tutorial this week]
Keywords: “Medium”, “Media Literacy”, “Media Studies”, “Media Theory”
Questions: What are your media literacy strengths? How often do you use them? Would you describe your use as ‘critical competence’?
Reading: Merrin, William. (2009) “Media Studies 2.0: upgrading and open-sourcing the discipline” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1(1): 17-34.

Week 2
Lecture: The Rise of the Idiots
Why is there a fear of stupidity? Who is afraid of what? Are idiots taking over? Do we want to ward off stupidity or do we want to create it? Ideology and the Mass Media. High versus low culture. What is the culture industry? In this lecture we examine some of the tensions around the perceived role of media in the general ‘dumbing down’ of culture.
Tutorial:
Keywords: “High Culture”, “Mass Culture”, “Ideology”, “Mass Media”
Questions: Who are the masses? How does advertising and the cultural industry produce conformity?
Consider the passage below transcribed from episode one of Nathan Barley:
“The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection. They wear their waistbands below their balls. They babble into handheld twit machines about that cool email of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He’s an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity. Hail The Rise of the Idiots.” Dan Ashcroft, Rise of the Idiots, Sugar Ape magazine from the Nathan Barley television show
Discuss the ‘paradox’ Dan Ashcroft mentions here. What is the role of media in producing or resolving this paradox?
Reading: Adorno, Theodor. (1991) “The Schema of Mass Culture” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Routledge: London. pages 61-97 [in particular pages 83-86]

Week 3
Lecture: The Academic Cultural Industry?
Publishing and the university. Why is publishing central to the work of academics? Primary and secondary texts. Are there now tertiary scholarly texts (i.e. Wikipedia)? How to find relevant research material, navigating primary, secondary and tertiary media texts. A brief introduction to how to read academic journal articles. A brief introduction to how to write a scholarly essay.
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Database”, ‘Thesis” (from the Bate and Sharpe reading, pages 14-15)
Questions:
Where is the University of Canberra library?
Gardner and Eng discuss four characteristics of ‘Gen Y’ (that is, YOU) and their (YOUR) expectations about how to use libraries:
1. They have great expectations.
2. They expect customization.
3. They are technology veterans.
4. They utilize new communication modes.
What do they mean? Are these accurate?
How has the university developed as a key site in the production and distribution of knowledge? Is it possible to think of the university as a creative industry? What media literacy skills are required to consume and produce these texts of the university? How has the ‘new media’ ‘search’ culture affected the way research is carried out?
What do Bate and Sharpe mean by active reading and active listening? How does this relate to the panics around ‘idiots’ from last week?
Reading:
Bate, Douglas and Peter Sharpe. (1996) “Preparing an Essay Outline” Writer’s Handbook for University Students, Thompson: Melbourne. [Chapter 2] pages 9-24.
Optional Extra Reading:
Gardner, Susan and Susanna Eng. (2005) “What Students Want: Generation Y and the Changing Function of the Academic Library” portal: Libraries and the Academy, 5(3): 405-420

Week 4
Lecture: Semiotics: tl;dr
On how ‘semiology’ was developed from a set of conceptual tools to analyse language into ‘semiotics’ a tool to firstly understand and combat ideological indoctrination of mass culture and secondly understand how cultural meanings circulate through media. Roland Barthes – The Work versus the Text, Active readers. The question of identity.
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Sign”, “Text”, “Textuality”, “Semiotics”, “Decoder”
Questions: How do we communicate meaning? Does that mean everything is a text? Is there no ‘outside’ of the text?
Reading: Thwaites, T., Davis, L. & Mules, W. (2002) “Some Aspects of Signs” [Chapter 1] Introducing cultural and media studies: a semiotic approach: Palgrave Pages 9-28.

Week 5
Lecture: Culture War: Hegemony and Ideology
We go to war this week. THE CULTURE WARS.
The “ABC is full of left-wing bias” and “News Ltd publications reproduce bourgeois ideology” are two perspectives on the role of media in cultural politics. There is a history of scholarship in media studies that examines the way the dominant ideology is reproduced through hegemonic processes. What is ideology? What is hegemony? Why does it matter who sits on the board of the ABC?
Semiotic analysis often examines the ideological dimension of texts. We shall explore ideology on a textual level and on a broader level relating to entire industries and the hegemonic reproduction of ideology.
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Hegemony”, “Media Hegemony”, “Ideology”, “Ideological Analysis”, “Ideological Bias”
Organise an in-class debate. Randomly distribute yourselves into ‘teams’. The topic is:
“The ABC should not have a broadcast television 24 hour news service and it also should not have an online news service. It is producing market failure.”
The first reading is essential for this in-class exercise (as well as reading the keywords!). Frame the debate in terms of ideology: hegemonic reproduction and ideological bias.
Reading:
Sloan, Judith. (2011) “The ABC: from correcting market failure to causing it.” The Drum Opinion. http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2818220.html (accessed 1/8/11)
Gitlin, Todd. (1979) “Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment” Social Problems 26 (3): 251-266
Optional Extra Reading:
Hall, Stuart. (1986) “The problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10: 28-44 [in particular: pages mid-38 until 43]

Week 6
Lecture: EVENT BIGNESS [3D Lecture!]
Where ever you look, you’ll find event bigness. From cinemas to premier television shows, event bigness is big. What is this monumental media? Will 3D cinema save the movie industry? Do you ever feel like you are part of history in the making? Dayan and Katz’s concept of the media event sought to account for and provide a typology of media events as the “live broadcasting of history”. Power of broadcast media. Have you felt part of something — ‘history’ or a ‘generation’, perhaps — when watching or listening to a broadcast? Discuss it in small group work, generate lists, and compare with other groups. Are there any patterns?
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Media Event”, “Broadcast”, “Spectacle”, “Image”, “Pseudo-Event”, “Simulacra”
Questions: Small group work, list some pseudo-events and discuss.
Reading:
Boorstin, Daniel. “A Flood of Pseudo-Events” The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
Optional Extra Reading:
Roche, M., 2004, “Mega-Events and Media Culture: Sport and the Olympics” in Rowe, D., (Ed), 2004, Critical Readings: Sport, Culture and the Media, Open University Press: Maidenhead, pp. 165-182.

Week 7
Lecture: Panic! At the disco.
Affect as feeling. Affect as power. But don’t media deal with ‘meaning’? How can they broadcast or transmit ‘affect’? Affect and popular music. Anxiety and the War on Terror. Affective contagion. Enthusiasm and Niche Media.
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Affect”, “Structures of Feeling”, “Contagion Effect”
Questions: When was the last time you go excited when you read about something, saw or heard something through media? What was it about? Why were you excited? Was something going to happen, had just happened or was in the midst of happening? Were you with anyone at the time? Did you share this information through social media? Why?
Reading:
Gibbs, Anna. (2008) “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field” Cultural Studies Review, 14(2): 130-145 [this is a tough article, have a go, but mainly focus on the pages 136 through to 142]

Week 8
Lecture: Television is dead: Post-Broadcast Media
What are the challenges posed to existing broadcast media by the processes of ‘convergence’? If the mass-media audience has fragmented does that mean that critiques of the mass media are no longer relevant?
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Audience Fragmentation”, “Convergence”, “Globalization”
Small group work: List your five favourite pieces of media content you have watch, read or listened to over the last week. How many were ‘broadcast’?
Are your media consumption habits ‘post-broadcast’? How? Why?
Reading: Tay, Jinna and Graeme Turner (2008) “What is television? Comparing media systems in the post-broadcast era” Media International Australia 128: 71-81

Week 9
17/10/11 Lecture: What is the Matrix? Media Franchises and Media ‘Worlds’
Cross-media production. Transmedia storytelling. What is ‘narrative’? The problem of a complex media environment. Media technologies. Beyond texts and events towards media ecologies.
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Narrative”, “Media Ecology”
Small group work: What ‘transmedia narratives’ have you engaged with? Was this narrative form better than a conventional text? Did you spend more money engaging with a transmedia narrative?
Readings:
Jenkins, Henry, ‘Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling’, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93–130.
Aarseth, Espen (2006) ‘The Culture and Business of Cross-Media Productions’, Popular Communication, 4: 3, 203 — 211

Week 10
Lecture: Gamification of Everything: Play versus Narrative
In the mid-2000s a titanic battle was fought between game studies theorists regarding whether video games should be studied as narrative-based versus play-based. They assembled their LAN party armies and fought to the last frag under the shadow of Mount Doom. Both sides were utterly annihilated the late 2000s when the universe was transported into the underworld of Gamification. We take a somber look into this great war of the Ludology versus the Narratology, and examine how everyday life is now gamified.
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Videogame Studies”, “Play”, “Ludology” [and “Narrative” from the previous week]
Any gamers?
Besides staking out academic territory, what is at stake in the Ludology versus Narratology (non-)debate? What is ‘new’ about video games? What is ‘old’ about them?
What services or activities that you use have been turned into a game? Do you use them more or less? Is it better?
Reading:
Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca “What is a game?” Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Routledge: New York. [Chapter 3, pages 22-44]

Week 11
Lecture: If you search “Google” in Google, you will break the internet
Is a culture based around ‘search’ a solution to the problem of a complex media culture? Algorithmic media and data. Protocol. Post-search culture, beyond Facebook and Google. What are some of the problems of ‘search’ culture? What happens to research in a ‘search’ culture? Why is research important?
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Participatory Culture”, “Social Media”, “Web 2.0”, “Data Mining”
Readings: Roehle, Theo (2009) “Dissecting the Gatekeepers – Relational Perspectives on the Power of Search Engines” Deep Search: The Politics of Search beyond Google. Studien Verlag

Week 12
Lecture: Stand up and be counted, audience metrics and participation
How are you constructed as the ‘audience’? How are you sold to advertisers? In the first part of this lecture we look at media texts from the other side. A media text is a tool for capturing an audience.
In the second half of the lecture we return to notions of active and passive audiences to examine if such concepts are relevant in the new convergent era. Is writing a Facebook status update producing a media text?
Tutorial:
Keywords: “Audience”, “Audience Research”, “Audience Studies”
Readings:
Hermes, J. (2009) “Audience Studies 2.0: On the theory, politics and method of qualitative audience research’ Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1(1): 111–127
Have a look at the Lord of the Rings Audience Research database: http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2160/589

Week 13
Lecture: Entrepreneur of the self?: Media work, media studies and media careers.
Media is defined, and the various attributes of the key media forms considered. We reflect on the overarching theoretical perspective of the media as utopian versus the critical views of the media as a corruptive influence. In doing so, we provide a general framework for this unit.
Tutorial:
Keywords: No keywords this week.
Reading: Deuze, Mark (2007) “Journalism” Media work Polity